A few weeks ago, I decided to jailbreak my iPhone 4. Mind you, this is a practice that I had abandoned almost 2 years ago when at the time I had an iPhone 3G. So why did I now decide that I wanted to jailbreak again? One reason: I wanted LockInfo, which gives me widgets right on my lock screen, such as weather, calendar, mail, to-do, and more importantly, notifications.

Now, listen, I love iOS as much or more than anyone else. I think it is an awesome platform and one that continues to evolve and get better as time goes on. However, there’s one area that Apple definitely needs to improve: the notifications. They are just awful and intrusive and Apple needs to address this in the next iteration of the software: iOS 5.0

LockInfo, paired with another jailbreak-only utility called Pop-Up Blocker, allowed me to bypass the annoying notification pop-ups that interrupt and pause my videos or get in the way of my Angry Birds playing session. Damn you iOS! Why must you get in the way of my pig-killing onslaught? Okay, okay, seriously, we all know those notification pop-ups are annoying so you get the idea.

I lived happily with these utilities for about a month until I started realizing why I don’t ever stick to a jailbroken iPhone. It is great in some ways to taste the freedom that jailbraking gives you but there’s always a downside, for me at least, and that is the performance degradation of the phone, if ever so slightly. Truth is, with the iPhone 4 this is not as bad since it has a much faster processor and more RAM than my old 3G did, however, I still could notice some UI lag at times and a slight hit on my battery life as well as occasional app crashes that didn’t happen before when my iPhone was in stock form.

For some people this may not be a problem and it’s a small price to pay for the freedom you get but for me it is a bit annoying and a compromise that I don’t seem to be willing to put up with. Therefore, Friday night I decided that I was going to restore my iPhone back to its original state. I missed the fluidity of the device that had been slightly compromised. I wanted to get my iPhone back to a pristine state so I decided not to restore from backup and instead restore as new phone. I had to spend a few hours syncing all apps, music, etc., but it was totally worth it. My iPhone 4 is as fast and snappy as it was when I first turned it on for the first time in June of 2010.

Now, let me get back to playing Angry Birds and cursing each time one of those pop-ups get in my way!

A new gadget made its arrival at my door today: the Amazon Kindle 3. So far I’m very excited about the device and believe it will help me get back to reading more books. I’ll report back on its use in a few weeks.